On March 24, the
president of Afghanistan, our
presumed ally in the war with al-Qaida and the
Taliban, condemned this
"crime against
the religion and the entire Muslim nation," called
on the United States to bring Jones to justice and
demanded "a
satisfactory response to the resentment and anger of
over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world."

Thus the
firebrand here is not just Jones, who perpetrated the
sacrilege, but Karzai, who made certain his countrymen
knew what happened 10,000 miles away and four days
before.

Friday, after
prayers in Mazer-e-Sharif, a mob, inflamed by imams
denouncing Jones, descended on the U.N. compound. When
they left, seven U.N. employees lay dead, two reportedly
beheaded.

Still, on
Saturday, rioters waving Taliban flags and shouting
"Death to
America" and
"Death to Karzai" went on a rampage in Kandahar that
ended with nine Afghans dead and 80 injured when they
tried to march on the U.N. compound and security troops
fired on them.

Three more were
killed Sunday as riots continued in Kandahar and spread
to Jalalabad. Forty more suffered gunshot wounds.

Petraeus then
met with Karzai, who issued a
new statement demanding that
"the U.S.
government, Senate and Congress clearly condemn (the Rev. Jones') dire action and avoid such incidents in the future."

In short, our
ally seized this opportunity to rub America's nose in
what the Rev. Jones did, as though the U.S. government,
whose highest civilian and military officials had
condemned Jones, is morally culpable for not preventing
his Quran-burning and not punishing him for it.

Nor is this
sufficient. Henceforth, the U.S. government is to police
its citizenry to ensure no such anti-Islamic sacrilege
takes place again.

Intending no
disrespect, who do these people think they are?

Undeniably, it
was an incendiary insult to a religion professed by
almost a fourth of the world's people for Jones to do
what he did. But what does this murderous reaction to a
book-burning tell us about the people for whose right of
self-determination Americans are fighting and dying in
Afghanistan?

Candidly, it
affirms what we already knew.

Many Afghans
believe beheading or stoning is the right response to an
insult to Islam. And not only that. Five years ago,
Abdul Rahman,
an Afghan convert to Christianity, faced the death
penalty for apostasy and was forced to flee his own
country.

In some Muslim
countries, death is the prescribed punishment for
Muslims who convert, for Christians who seek converts
and for any who insult Islam, like that
Danish cartoonist who sketched a caricature of the
Prophet with a fused bomb for a turban.

Stoning is also
seen as proper punishment for women who commit adultery.

In Pakistan
recently, the governor of Punjab and the Cabinet
minister for religious minorities, both Catholics, were
assassinated. Why? Both had opposed a law under which a
Christian woman had been sentenced to death after some
farmhands accused her of blasphemy.

The governor was
murdered by his own bodyguard, who was then hailed
by 500 religious scholars who urged all Muslims to
boycott the governor's funeral ceremony, as he had
gotten what he deserved.

In the last two
years, Christians have been burned alive by Muslims in
Gorja, Pakistan, and by
Hindu extremists in
Orissa, India. Christian churches have been torched
and scores of the faithful massacred on holy days in
Iraq and Egypt. Few of these atrocities have received
the media attention of the Rev. Jones' stupid stunt or
the Danish cartoonist's irreverent scribbles.